Understanding Reference Objects

K provides context and trust to your data items by helping you understand the lineage and relationships between data items. K builds the lineage map by detecting connections between data items like tables.

Sometimes lineage can be detected to tables that exist in sources that are not onboarded to K. If this happens, K will create the table (and database & schema) as a reference object and continue to show it in the lineage map. All reference objects are shown in grey as indicted in the diagram below.

Open

To check, you can always click on the table and in the pop up panel that appears, it will indicate that the data type is reference table.

Open

Because Reference objects belong to sources that are not onboarded into K, they have limited details available on their profile page. Editing a Reference object is not currently available.